


Golden Dandelions

by aster_risk



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, I like to make pretty things with no real plot, Post-Episode: s11e10 My Struggle IV, Vignettes, stupid midlife miracle baby - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-04-28 07:13:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14444112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: A series of little character studies and vignettes set in the heat of summer. Mulder and Scully in love, a lifetime of Scully's dreams, pretty sunset scenes from the Unremarkable House. Consider this a storage house for my more poetic ficlets.Like my other Barns-Courtney inspired fics, this one's title is taken from the song "Golden Dandelions," and I'm going to try to stick to the tone of the song if I write more of these ficlets.





	1. In Dreams

As a child, Scully dreams novels—legendary things, epics worthy of the ancient Greeks, brimming with pixie dust. She dreams a cherry tree with a different woman’s face on each blossom, a plethora of talking dragons, web-footed fey creatures that catch flies on their tongues. She dreams the looming sorcerer of her nightmares, with three fingers on each hand and a scarlet cape. The names of knights spill over her tiny lips, and when she wakes up, she’s sorry if she can’t recall them. ****

She hardly remembers the dreams of her adolescence. Maybe she’s too tired; maybe she can’t distinguish them from reality. Her teenage years are a blur of spiked jackets and Marlboros, making out with Larry Monsoon on the roof of her parents’ house and Missy taking credit for the condoms Ahab finds in the car. There are at least a hundred dreams of tests, more anxiety-inducing than the exams themselves. Sex dreams a plenty, probably more pleasurable than the sex she’s having at the time. Every once in awhile, a puff of mysticism, to counteract the strict diet of rebellion and heart-guarding rationality she keeps to in her waking hours.

 

More memorable and certainly more nagging are her dreams of Mulder. The wet dreams, the wild fantasies from their earlier days of working together. Restraining herself at work, she goes home to a ten-dollar vibrator and errant thoughts of her partner. When she dreams, it is sensual and extravagant; it is of parts of him. Taut pectorals, ripe lower lip, hazel eyes that never stop seeking. Hands before hips. Hips before hands. Once, after she watches  _Mission: Impossible_ , she dreams that he walks into their office in that red speedo, abdominals glistening, leans in to kiss her—and then whips off his Mulder-mask to reveal Assistant Director Skinner. After the Eddie van Blundht incident, she shoves that dream to the back of her mind.

 

However wild her sub-conscious fantasies become, they never measure up to the real thing. It’s worth noting that after they finally cave, when she smashes her mouth to his in the front seat of a shitty rental car, when they fuck in some dingy middle-of-nowhere motel, she dreams of him markedly less often.  _No. That’s not true._ She still dreams of him, but her dreams settle comfortably in the mundane. She dreams of him popping a giant gum bubble and its pink splatter getting on her paperwork. She dreams Skinner calls them onto a case in the middle of a tropical vacation, and the hassle of catching a flight home wakes her. She dreams of facing him at the altar, wearing emerald green, and then running away before she can give her vows. She dreams that he forgives her, and they drive off into a desert sunset and live happily ever after in unwed sin. Sometimes, in the ever-changing narrative of her dream-life, Mulder dies of cancer, but sometimes it’s Scully in the coffin, watching him grieve for her and seeking the words to describe him like an omniscient narrator. She hates being the mournful storyteller more than anything.

 

When she’s pregnant with William, sleep is a reprieve. Going through the motions at work, she yearns to cast herself onto Mulder’s vacant couch, palm pressed against her growing son, and retreat into the world her brain creates for her. Scully has always been confident in her mind’s ability to provide what she needs to survive, so she pretends her dreams aren’t making things worse. Her dream world, once a land of magic and heroes, restricts itself to a green, loose-shingled house on the edge of an empty planet. There, the leaves are always blotted auburn and muted yellow; the wheatgrass is always dry and rustling in an autumn breeze. The dragonflies are always overgrown, swarming in clouds of violent blue and indigo, the sheen on their backs so bright she almost has to avert her eyes. A worn swing-set rocks gently in the front yard. A gangly, red-haired boy in a plaid shirt chases beetles the size of rats. Mulder is there, some nights a wise face etched into the only oak tree, dispensing loving words to his family, some nights tossing a baseball to his son, on the best nights turning dust into fireflies with a touch of his palms. Scully watches them from the rickety porch—always the porch—and marvels at the setting sun. The sun is always setting. The sun never sets.

 

On the run, she dreams of the fountain of youth spilling liquid gold, and Spender emerging from it with a lit cigarette between his fingers. She dreams of monsters, always monsters, babies with the black eyes of aliens and her own dry skin shedding into copper scales. She is surprised these dreams never caught her earlier, while she was neck deep in the X Files and her rational reality chipped away. Mulder’s arms sooth the assault of distorted creatures, but she still dreams of horns sprouting from William’s soft baby-skull and a dragon’s muzzle from his snout. She still sometimes imagines Mulder’s arm around her shoulders wrinkled and rotted and turned to dust in a matter of minutes, then turns in the mirror to find her own body reduced to a bonesack with a head of red hair and a cross dangling into her ribcage.

 

When she leaves him, it’s all sex dreams again. The wacky ones from her youth, intermixed with something more tender and mature. There’s more stroking in these fantasies, greater exploration and less hammering into the headboard. Somewhere, filed in the recesses of her brain, is a pegging dream that still makes her blush, but it’s the one where he fucks her in an empty airport Chili’s until she cries out his name that jolts her awake with an orgasm she isn’t prepared for. That’s the one that leaves her wet and aching for him, after all their time apart. She’ll never admit it, but that’s the one that makes her cry.

 

She stops dreaming when she sees him again. Except for one night, when a picture of their home in the dead of winter appears clearer than if she were actually seeing it. Inside, she is reading the newspaper; he is smoking a curved pipe. A deerstalker hat sits on their kitchen table. She turns to him and asks, with all sincerity, “do you mind if I practice my violin?” It doesn’t matter that she’s never played the violin in her life. It is an urgent matter. Outside, she hears the scuff of a horse and carriage in the snow. She tells him later, and he tries to convince her that no,  _he’s_  the Sherlock Holmes in their partnership more than she is, since she’s a medical doctor and keeps his feet grounded in reality. Scully calls bullshit. She is always Holmes, and Mulder will never be one hundred percent grounded in reality. It’s one of the reasons she fell in love with him.

 

She has a hazy summer, rosy and heavily pregnant with their daughter. The August heat is unbearable; her tank tops are too small, so she fans herself all day and in the evening lets their baby feel Virginia sunlight. Her shoulders are tan. Her belly is smooth as a skipping stone. She lies on their sky-blue adirondack chair for hours on end in a sort-of half-conscious state, listening to the hum of dragonflies. If her eyes close for a few seconds, she dreams of rivers and wildflowers. The murky Potomac, a slender brook, a roaring mountain cascade with her mother’s face etched into the current. Where she sits, facing the setting sun, fey creatures rustle in the untamed grass—little girls with freckles, Mulder’s eyes, and butterfly-wings, wearing skirts sewn of autumn leaves and carrying thumbtack swords in their hands. She dreams of weatherbeaten horses the color of ripe buckeyes galloping towards her. Fox Mulder rides to her in a suit of armor, shaggy and noble, his stubble greying but beautiful as it ever was. He takes off his gloves and presses his cheek against her rounded abdomen. He tucks a dying dandelion behind her ear. On the other horse is her son, a ranger-boy—a wiry, green-caped adolescent Jackson who hasn’t yet solidified his place in the world. Elfish ears stick up through his hair. She notices—from both their backs sprout the wings of crows, for they have died and lived to tell the tale. She embraces them.


	2. August

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An expansion on the final scene from In Dreams, 
> 
> "She has a hazy summer, rosy and heavily pregnant with their daughter. The August heat is unbearable; her tank tops are too small, so she fans herself all day and in the evening lets their baby feel Virginia sunlight."
> 
> This is one of those evenings.

When they were young she hated August. She always made that perfectly clear, rolling down the car windows and sticking out her head like a golden retriever in a last ditch effort to keep cool. She bemoaned the basement’s poor ventilation, the ever-present smell of sweat and cologne and hot hairspray. Milkshakes became her lifeblood. She could chase down an ice cream truck in four inch heels.

 

Mulder thought he understood—Scully was winter-brittle, hand-carved to fit the boxy suits and trench coats she donned in December. As she got older, she had sharpened into a geometric masterpiece, all bones and ink lines. Scully never bent; she always broke. August was too pliant for her.

 

This year, August comes to them in the stench of rotting pollen and the fist of humidity around their throats. The midday heat is unbearable, and at seven months pregnant, Scully paces about the house in too-small t-shirts and acquires an endearing variety of tan lines striped across her abdomen. She moves like wax down a candle, hot and languid and sticky, melting into the furniture.

 

In the evenings, though—after the Hell-heat has given way to crickets and dandelions, August curls into Scully like soft sunlight. She wears fluttery trousers the color of fresh-baked bread, cotton tank tops and a button-up that sails behind her when she walks into the wind. She lets herself step outside barefoot, into the peat and wheatgrass and the corpses of cherry blossoms, and allows the tepid ooze of their petals to smush between her toes.

 

Mulder is unaccustomed to this side of her, this sprung-from-the-earth side that enjoys the smell of fresh grass clippings. It’s not that she’s changed—sure, she’s aged like wine and cheese, and he could wax poetic about the fresh freckles that summer has given her. But this rosy, bare Scully and the icy Scully of his youth are not mutually exclusive, so he pretends not to notice the fresh vulnerability of Scully as she is now. He pretends he didn’t hear her explain the intricacies of angiosperm plant reproduction to their unborn child. He watches pots of basil and droopy tomato plants accumulate on the porch. He watches her scrub dirt from the ridges of her palms.

 

Tonight, Scully lies in the newly-mowed grass, hands clasped over her chest, her hair splayed among the dandelions. The sky tints her pink. The cries of cicadas mill about her like they’re singing hymns to her beauty, and dragonflies buzz relentlessly in the distance, mating and murdering and mating and murdering. A biological opera. Their daughter stretches and struggles in her mold. Scully is the shape of the setting sun.

 

“I can hear you think,” she says dryly. “It’s very distracting.”

 

“How did you know I was here?”

 

She opens one eye, squinting snarkily at him. “You crunch.”

 

So bone-dry grass announces him. He hums and lies down next to her, ignoring the creak of his knees. They’re old—so they are; so what? It happened fast, age; they were flung into it like they lost time. He’d still rewind his life for her if he could. If she wanted him to. But if this is what old feels like, lying beside Scully in their untamed yard, he’ll take the life he’s got left.

 

“What are you thinking about?” That’s another thing about August—her voice has smoothened to a warm croon, melting like butter in the heat. As ripe and velvet-smooth as the rest of her.

 

“You.” He takes her hand and tries to pull her into his lap. She scoots toward him with a grunt, lying across him with her head on his chest.

 

“You’ll have to be more specific,” she teases.

 

He grins at the touch of her cheek against his neck. “You fit very nicely into this scene,” he says. “The sunlight, the crickets, the constant churn of living things.”

 

She hums, the same pitch as the cicadas. She runs her hand down her belly. She has grown with the air, with the clouds swelling and greying overhead. She is softer and heavier, and Mulder jokes that when the baby comes, she’ll come like a thunderstorm. He tries to disguise how mesmerizing it all is. Covering her hand with his, searching her skin for the flutter of a kick, he does a poor job of hiding it.

 

Scully grins something lopsided and stunning. “She’s as still as everything else tonight,” she tells him, sighing against his chest. She’s right. He can’t feel the usual roll or the protrusion of a foot through her shirt. Nor can he feel the ghost of a breeze. Everything is frozen but the dragonflies.

 

He kisses her. He can’t stand it any longer, the thickening of the air between them like it’s about to catch fire. Scully leans into it, rolling over to face him. He cups her cheek with one hand, with the other on the baby lodged between them. He pulls her as close as he can, ignores the itch of grass against his back.

 

When he kisses her again, her teeth graze his skin, slipping from his lips to his jaw almost too quickly. Her nose bumps against his cheek, and he feels sloppy and amateur in the best way possible. He feels like they’re young and still learning the ropes of things, and even the fuck-ups feel spectacular.

 

“Hi, Scully,” he whispers giddily. Maybe it’s the heat, that’s left them both exhausted and insatiable. Hungry for each other, too lazy to move.

 

“Hi.”

 

She wraps her arm around his neck and clings to him, her tongue grazing his teeth. His neck is cricked, but he doesn’t dare pull them apart, not just yet. He breathes in the scent of her, conifers and shampoo and strawberry ice cream.

 

When he does pull away, her cheeks bloom scarlet. She gazes at him through heavy eyelids, lips curved into a smirk. He studies her smile lines. Her features aren’t as severe as in the old days, but her lines and steely angles are all still there. Time apart has erased nothing, etched a little more.

 

Maybe he was wrong before. Maybe August has always suited her. Maybe she hated August because they were always in the thick of it, the muggy air sticking to their suits with the stench of DC’s commuter exhaust. Or, they were breathing in a blazing desert, or another interchangeable Midwestern Mystery Ride, somewhere between a crop circle and a field of mutilated bodies.

 

Maybe it’s that—their Augusts were always spent waiting for something. Waiting for the muggy air to finally split, for the leaves to die, for the harvest and the dying that comes after. And maybe they’re finally waiting for something happy.

 

He thinks of a bright blue adirondack chair sitting lonesome in their yard. Some nights, Scully lolls in the chair, curls up to watch the sunset. They got it from their son one day in July. Jackson appeared with the chair strapped to the roof of his beater car and announced that he would restore it to its former glory. They never asked where it came from—they accepted the chair with their son and took it as a sign of his permanence. It was rotting, then, a sickly brown color. Jackson made it his personal project to repair the chair and paint it himself. Mulder suspects he just wanted to create something with his hands, something mundane and practical. It is his way of being human, and Mulder doesn’t question it. He knows another old chair sits out front, next to a green paint can. Jackson came and went, but as long as the decrepit chairs remain, they know he’s coming back.

 

It is August. Scully waits for her daughter to arrive. She waits for her son to return. It is not the waiting of the bereft, but a happy waiting. There is promise on the horizon, of thunderstorms, of slow sex in their rickety bed, of a daughter who will know her father, of a son who will soon return.

 

It is August. Mulder runs his fingers through her cropped hair. The sun dips below the horizon, and when he tears his eyes from Scully, the crickets have turned into fireflies.


	3. Spider Eggs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scully shares her pregnancy with a spider and her eggs, in a strange but fitting friendship.

The wood pile rotting in their backyard plays host to a society of the Virginia suburbs’ most unwanted. Mulder likes to think they chose this house on purpose, the old-but-still-kicking home of FBI rejects and the sometimes-home of a superhero who doesn’t want to be. Three people whom even death turned away.

 

Scully lets a raccoon scuffle about as long as it stays away from the house. She tolerates garter snakes and even the stag that munches on their garden. But it’s the black widow spider, tucked into a shadowy corner of the wood pile that fascinates her. She keeps her distance—she’s isn’t stupid—but she watches it craft an immaculate mess of a web. A perfectly disordered home.

 

One evening in July, the egg sac takes her by surprise. A tight little ball of twine nestled in the corner of the web. Always polite, Scully offers her congratulations.

 

She’s pretty sure that one typically shares one’s pregnancy with other women—women from mommy blogs and well-timed doctors’ appointments, not a venomous spider she found in the backyard. She has also stopped caring what people typically do—a side effect of twenty-five years with Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder and of being at least fifteen years older than the couples they see in the obstetrician’s waiting room.

 

Scully bears her heart to the eight-legged companion. It makes sense, somehow. She carries a cocktail of emotions that only a spider would understand—dancing on fragile strings, catching meals on the fly. Like a spider, she hunts and is hunted her entire life. It’s a wonder she and Mulder were never squished under an old man’s combat boot. It’s a wonder he never crushed their bodies with a dead cigarette and left them dismembered on a grocery store sidewalk for some child to gawk at, scarlet hourglass shining flat on the asphalt.

 

When Melissa was ten years old, a black widow bit her arm while she was playing in the holly bushes, and Ahab rushed her to the emergency room. They pumped her full of an antidote and sent her home, promising that after a few days of nausea and low fever, she would be fine. For such an infamous creature, the black widow’s attack was strangely underwhelming.

 

Scully overlooks the crack between two decrepit boards where the spider has built its family. She sips an extra-large lemonade from the gas station down the street. She resents how awkwardly she moves through the tall grass, keys in one hand and soda in the other, her still-small baby bump cumbersome even now. In the isolation of their middle-of-nowhere home, she wants to be vocally proud of her unborn child, and she wants someone to listen.

 

“Hey, Missy,” she says, stopping ten feet from the spider and her eggs. At first, she wondered if it was inappropriate to name it Missy, but this is how she honors her sister because if Missy were here, she would share share in this strange experience. If Missy were to be reincarnated, she would love to come back as a spider.

 

The spider crawls lazily into the light, teetering on the upper strand of its web. There it stills. Its hourglass glints in the sun.

 

“We haven’t spoken since the twenty week appointment,” Scully begins to ramble. “It’s a healthy baby, but with my age and my medical history I’m afraid to be optimistic. Will came by the other day, and he seems excited by the prospect of a baby sister. I think it makes him hopeful, and every time he smiles, the guilt wears off a little bit. It’s strange and awkward with him. It’s strange and awkward to be pregnant again. Everything is awkward, but I’m getting used to it.”

 

Today is the first day she’s stopped feeling as though her life is a haunted house, an endless stretch of waiting for something awful to jump out at you. To spin around and find a horrifying creature chasing you with a chainsaw like a fucking Halloween movie.

 

Mulder helps. He looks at her like she netted the moon and hung it over his bed. He touches her gingerly, with unadulterated amazement, as if she rode into his life in a UFO and her body is made of gypsy moths, fleeting and velvet-soft. Like the moths beneath their porch light, she is bordering on clumsily large, although in coming months she’ll not so much flutter as awkwardly waddle.

 

The spider retreats back into its web and crouches over its egg sac. Scully envies its slow grace. She hopes she remains as elegant as Missy, as quietly confident in her ability to protect her children from harm. Scully likes to think she has a dangerous bite, deadly to anyone who tries to hurt her son or her unborn daughter. She has bitten like Missy in the past, with her firearm. Too many times, she’s had to bite.

 

She tells Missy, “I hope your family is healthy. You chose a nice home; any closer to the house and we might have to relocate you. I don’t think your babies would like ours very much.” She chuckles softly and dares to touch the curve of her abdomen. Dares to believe she’ll have a baby and not a tragedy. Sometimes, it hurts too much to be skeptical.

 

She wishes Missy a happy evening and goes inside.

 

 

Autumn arrives, and with it the spider’s inexorable death. She didn’t really consider this part. The part where befriending a spider would inevitably end in her standing teary-eyed before the empty web and it’s stiff exoskeleton hourglass-up in the grass. She is a scientist. She’s read  _Charlotte’s Web_. She knows how these things go. That doesn’t stop her overflowing hormones or the stupid tendency of humans to anthropomorphize everything they speak to.

 

Standing next to her, Mulder pulls her into a hug. “I’m sorry, Scully. I didn’t know she was that important to you.”

 

“I didn’t either,” Scully sniffs. She allows herself a weepy laugh. “I feel silly.”

 

“No,” Mulder tilts her chin and kisses her. “Never silly.”

 

She wipes the corners of her eyes. “It’s hormones.”

 

“Scully,” he says, “you’re allowed to be sad over a spider. It doesn’t invalidate your grief for bigger tragedies.”

 

“I know…” Scully trails off. “It’s irrational, but I hoped she would live until the baby was born.” Mother to mother, creature to creature on this unforgiving planet. She took comfort in watching the egg sac bloom, the lives within it healthy and strong. Her own stomach rounded in time with the knot of spider silk. For each day the spider eggs grew, she let herself hope that something so small would survive here, in the fragile ruins of a human structure. If the spider could do it so could she, and oh, how fragile she felt. She had forgotten how small her frame had always been, how spare and wiry. She only got tougher with age.

 

“Scully?”

 

She looks up to Mulder’s concerned eyes. “Hmm?”

 

“Are you ready to go inside?”

 

It’s code for  _I love you_. Everything is. The way he grills sandwiches in his boxers, the way he inhales the blueberry scent of her shampoo after they shower, the way he plays eighties rock so quietly it sounds like a waltz and dances her around their living room. She sees it in the way he makes love to her at sunrise, the way he rolls up her nightshirt when he thinks she’s asleep and presses his cheek to her belly, the way he worships her body as if everything and nothing has changed.

 

“Yes. Let’s go in,” she agrees. She clings to the smell of him—fresh grass and sawdust and the coffee she can’t drink—and together, they go inside. Before she closes the door, Scully whispers a brief, “thank you,” to Missy the poisonous spider, for the odd comforts she provided. And odd friendship was what she needed, to match the oddness blossoming in every other facet of her life.

 

Outside, the breeze ruffles Missy’s empty web, twitches the corpse’s legs. The trees bend; the forest churns and hums with living creatures. Insects mate and die. Life finds a way. A tiny black spider takes shelter in a knot of wood.

**Author's Note:**

> Consider this another one of my late night ramblings, as I procrastinate multiple papers. Apologies to Jess Mabe who I do not know for referencing her fic but I couldn’t help it. It was too good a chance to pass up.


End file.
